Who knows?

September 29, 2018 9:54 AM

The Crying Of Lot 55: The Unsolved Mysteries And Alternate Realities Of Andrew W.K. A really lengthy deep dive into the universe of someone who may or may not exist, possibly because he chooses to/not to.
posted by hippybear (49 comments total)

.....Or, the whole thing is a Joaquin-Phoenix"I'm Still Here"-style marketing concept.

The author of this piece really studied his Lovecraft, though, I'll give him that.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:28 AM on September 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

Still my favorite theory about Andrew WK (from a post almost 10 years ago)
posted by hopeless romantique at 10:35 AM on September 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

That's literally mentioned in TFA. Go, read!
posted by hippybear at 10:37 AM on September 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

Sorry! I'm halfway through.
posted by hopeless romantique at 10:38 AM on September 29, 2018

what the hell did I just read?
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 10:38 AM on September 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

you didn't
posted by gwint at 10:39 AM on September 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

This thing is the essence of tl;dr so I'll link to this MeFi comment from someone who knew him in school. (And before anyone says RTFA, I tried, honest, but it's just too much of a much.) There's also the capper to this Guardian review:

WK plays with notions of identity and persona, constructing an increasingly arcane mythology around himself that turns reality inside out. Certainly, no other rock star is as odd as WK. He posts lengthy digressions on the benefits of 'self-monitoring' on his MySpace page. His album features photographs of him in starkly unnatural poses and bathed in ultraviolet light. At times, he doesn't seem to be himself.

This has led fans to chew on conflicting rumours, many of which seem to suggest WK might indeed be a put-on. And that all this confusion has been intentionally sown by someone called Steev Mike, his 'executive producer', who may or may not be an alter-ego of WK himself. It is as if he's rapidly deconstructing himself into the rock star that wasn't there, the only certainty being that this story has not yet run its course.

"Paul is Dead", Prince's time as Glyph/TAFKAP, pretty much Bowie's entire career, and so on. Very meta.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:57 AM on September 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

One of my favorite little things about Andrew W.K. is that he tried to be part of Wolf Eyes, he even made illegitimate "Wolf Eyes" tapes.
posted by idiopath at 11:01 AM on September 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

AWK did a giant outreach to the furry community maybe 2 years ago (?), and I ended up following him because of that. His subsequent "inspirational" work since then has been floating through my life because of that.

After reading this piece, I'm left puzzled about exactly what to think about anything involving AWK.

Although reaching out to a fandom who likes to pretend they aren't even humans somehow fits.
posted by hippybear at 11:10 AM on September 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm still working my way through this essay, but I will say that I now have a better appreciation of how weird an album 'I Get Wet' really is (never heard the other albums; like The Darkness, Andrew WK seemed like a one-hit wonder in my own little mind). My friends would joke about how every song sounded the same, and we all thought it was some goofy party metal album and little more. But I appreciated the idea of pop music married to a metal format (more recent projects like Babymetal helped formalise the process). I used it often during my cardio sessions at the gym -- it seems a nicely mindless thirty-minute album that timed out nicely while I was on the treadmill.

But now, reading lyrics to songs like 'New York City', I am amazed by how I had tuned out the strange violence of the music over all these years. Like the bloody-faced album cover was just a put-on; like the juxtaposition of songs like 'Party Hard' against 'Ready To Die' meant little or nothing at all. I thought I had appreciated the seeming good humour of Andrew WK all these years. I honestly thought I was in on the joke. Now I'm not sure what album I thought I was listening to all along.

Huh.
posted by spoobnooble II: electric bugaboo at 11:11 AM on September 29, 2018 [7 favorites]

It turns out the real Andrew WK was the party that was inside us all, all along...
posted by 1f2frfbf at 11:12 AM on September 29, 2018 [14 favorites]

Prince's time as Glyph/TAFKAP

Except didn't that turn out to be a very straightforward (if somewhat surface-baroque) means for Prince to legally extricate himself from his crappy Warner Bros. contract?

Whereas the more I read about Andrew W.K., the more I feel like all of the speculation is just a weird smokescreen around the fact that he's doing a very straightforward, almost normcore version of punk rock music. If you just listen to the records, there's very little there that wouldn't sit comfortably next to, say, the New York Dolls or Ramones. It's only when you dig into the marketing that anything seems odd, and at that point I have to break out Occam's Razor: If you someone wants to believe that Andrew W.K. is multiple dudes or a programmed Illuminati pawn, then they should also have to consider whether Bowie was actually from outer space, if Alice Cooper actually is an undead ghoul, or if the Aquabats really are superheroes from Aquabania.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:30 AM on September 29, 2018 [12 favorites]

MetaFilter: Alice Cooper actually is an undead ghoul
posted by hippybear at 11:38 AM on September 29, 2018 [6 favorites]

That article read like a pay-by-word piece. Tedious!
posted by parm=serial at 11:39 AM on September 29, 2018 [9 favorites]

My favorite theory is that Andrew WK is Dave Grohl's alter-ego...when he's not on stage with the Foo Fighters, Grohl is WK, in real life...
posted by littlejohnnyjewel at 11:44 AM on September 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

Hooooly fuck that writer. It's a never ending barrage of "I'm about to tell you a fact, but just a warning, the next 4 paragraphs are filled with more warnings!". I made it about 2/3 and I feel like I just ran a marthon.

IDK, it just sounds like AWK was a one hit wonder in the early 00s and has been trying to go viral and become relevant again ever since.
posted by mannequito at 11:48 AM on September 29, 2018 [11 favorites]

55 Cadillac is pretty goddamned good.
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:17 PM on September 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

I didn't get very far either. These days, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about Andrew WK is that time my brain exploded when I saw him hosting a no-budget kids' game show on Nickelodeon.
posted by Brocktoon at 12:39 PM on September 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

MEFI HARD
posted by Barack Spinoza at 1:19 PM on September 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

(imagine the marquee tag worked here)
posted by Barack Spinoza at 1:19 PM on September 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

I thought this piece was so fun! I'm mad grateful someone took the time to compile all this into one read.

I love reading about conspiracies and backpedaling and marketing.
posted by sweetjane at 4:09 PM on September 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

This is the worst written thing I have ever seen on the blue. It's not that it's not interesting, and it's not that it's bad, but... editors. Editors exist for a reason. A good editor could have made this piece party hard.
posted by The River Ivel at 4:20 PM on September 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

So... something about the writing and how this is pieced together. Way too much and too long.
Item A: You see what I mean about “labyrinthine puzzle”? That comment has been online for nearly 11 years now, and I don’t know if even 50 people have ever seen it. I don’t know how I actually found it in the first place, and I don’t know if I could find it again. I don’t know who wrote it, but I would bet my life on this:
It was written by Andrew W.K.
So this author has been assembling this article for HOW MANY YEARS? "I don't know if I could find it again?" You copied something from online and can't search for your quote again? I did. Google search result: #1.
Item B: I have blockquoted bits of text
I'm an ELA teacher among other things and I had a student who would write "And I quote" before every quotation in an essay. Amateur. Who identifies how they are going to make quotations? I don't know Stereogum or their standards or styles, but really?
Item C: At the end of 2004, an old friend of mind got in some business trouble
This quote was used twice, and "At the end of 2004" itself was used 4 times. I know it's a long article, but now you are fucking with me.
Item D: I’m going to excerpt some text from
Again?
Item E: By way of example, I’m excerpting an exchange from
Right.
Like The River Ivel just said... don't make it so damn hard to read. This article could have been less than half that length.
posted by Snowishberlin at 4:27 PM on September 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

...then they should also have to consider whether Bowie was actually from outer space... -posted by Strange Interlude at 1:30 PM

You say that like he's not.
posted by symbioid at 4:51 PM on September 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

Bowie has become Michael Landon for hipsters THERE I SAID IT
posted by thelonius at 4:56 PM on September 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Maybe Andrew W.K. wrote the article.
posted by kinsey at 5:11 PM on September 29, 2018 [16 favorites]

Good lord, that was... a thing.
posted by erst at 5:37 PM on September 29, 2018

After reading the first few paragraphs I thought I Get Wet sounds like a smarter Pretty Hate Machine, but then everything went batshitinsane.

I don’t buy the dissociative identity disorder theory. I used to have a close friend who has dissociative identity disorder and lived with her for a year as she began to come to terms with DID. Eight years later I lived with her and another woman with DID. Just based on my own experiences and reading I don’t think the DID theory holds water. First, the affected person has absolutely no control over when or which personality they switch to - there’s no way AWK could be sure that he was actually AWK and not Steev Mike or a five-year-old girl or an angry brogrammer at the time of a scheduled performance. Second, DID is diagnosed six times as much in females as it is in males. I concur that it’s not impossible that he has unresolved DID but I’d agree more with a different explanation for his thoughts and actions.

Also don’t miss Andrew W.K. singing “Party, Party” in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode where Frylock gets cancer.
posted by bendy at 8:03 PM on September 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Man, what was going on in Michigan in the 90s?

And why did I just spend a damn hour trying to read an article about Andrew WK?!

He's no KLF.
posted by SystematicAbuse at 8:55 PM on September 29, 2018 [7 favorites]

I didn't know much about Andrew WK before reading this, but, I really enjoyed the read.
posted by mitabrev at 9:03 PM on September 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

The writing was appalling, despite the subject matter being interesting. The first third of the the article felt like the written version of a bullshit History Channel documentary where they tease the answer to the question of the Black Sea Scrolls over and over and never answer anything. The remaining two thirds felt like the writer has jumped entirely up the asshole of their own concept for the article and didn't consider if maybe they were laboring an incredibly simple point that they don't actually fully reach. It is like watching a 30 minute video of someone masturbating without orgasm, but in written form.

Maybe Andrew W.K. wrote the article.

Given that the person on the byline is supposedly the managing editor of stereogum, the site it is published on, this is the only explanation I can accept. Or the editor of stereogum is the most indulgent writer on earth and should be ignored.

I did learn some things about AWK that matched with my vague understanding of him from second and third hand sources. Interesting analysis of lyrics and such. Good post, awful, embarrassing writing.
posted by neonrev at 10:34 PM on September 29, 2018

It really is very badly written; the effect is trying to put across the bafflement of the author but it really doesn't work.

In any case, here's the tl;dr: Andrew WK has been positioned as a party rock anthem kind of performer, but since the beginning of his official career there's been tidbits that it might not be entirely genuine. An early rumour was that Dave Grohl was somehow involved; the lyrical content of his songs doesn't really fit how they're marketed; and his official website was very quick to dive into weird codes and 'bullshit' (profound-sounding-but-meaningless verbiage).

The theory the author believes is most accurate is that Andrew WK is putting in a tremendous amount of effort to sow confusion, up to and including writing reams of text on "fan" websites and posing as collaborators, alternative personalities and childhood friends, as a kind of performance art. The intent appears to be to create his own non-existence; having previously been a real person, he is now trying to retroactively become an artificial creation of the music industry.

If that's true (the chief argument for it being: why would there be this much genuine speculation out there about Andrew WK of all people?), then, honestly, fuck that guy. The point appears to be to force people into the pleasure of contradiction, and for me that’s not pleasurable, it’s anxiety-inducing, and the amount of effort he appears to have gone to in order to sustain that is baffling for something so pointless.
posted by Merus at 12:42 AM on September 30, 2018

I loved this. Sure, it was rambly but it seemed like it was intentionally written in what i like to call 'the 70s paranoid style'. If this really is an art project from wk to make himself exist in the public eye and then disassemble that existence, I think it's fascinating and novel. I am surprised to see such a negative reaction in the comments above.

> the amount of effort he appears to have gone to in order to sustain that is baffling for something so pointless

You could say this about any large creative work. it's like asking why artists make paintings or music instead of getting a respectable job...
posted by thedaniel at 1:57 AM on September 30, 2018 [8 favorites]

Who Kares?
posted by chavenet at 2:44 AM on September 30, 2018

One of my favorite little things about Andrew W.K. is that he tried to be part of Wolf Eyes, he even made illegitimate "Wolf Eyes" tapes.

If Andrew had joined Wolf Eyes, they might have ended up more like this 2016 performance he did with Nate Young and Twig Harper at Detroit's Trip Metal Festival.

Nate, from Wolf Eyes, was in Nautical Almanac with Twig before Wolf Eyes, and all three of them were actually in Beast People together at one point. I was friends with Nate and Twig but Andrew was a couple years younger. In general though, the experimental and punk scene was very eclectic, fluid, and vibrant around Ann Arbor. We had a good freeform radio station and diverse local scene. A lot of these cats were randomly starting new bands, swapping members. I played a gig or two as a scratch DJ (which I suck at) for Mini-Systems, another Nate Young project, without ever having rehearsed with them or anything. His girlfriend was also tap dancing on stage with circuit-bent fisher-price tap dance shoes going into my mixer.?.

All of these bands spawned out of a musical collective called Scheme while they were still in high school, who did lots of shows but never recorded much, and had a rotating cast of up to 20+ members at times playing brass instruments, drums, percussion, homemade garbage, etc.

All of this is to say, I can't even remember half the joke names, made up bands, one off shows, etc. from that time so it's not at all surprising that Andrew ended up continuing some of that confusion-driven creative mystique later on.
posted by p3t3 at 3:08 AM on September 30, 2018 [10 favorites]

So, I found out about this article because it was sent out on W.K.'s mailing list. Here's what it said.

IMPORTANT

This article is claiming that Andrew W.K. is a fraud or that he's part of an organized secret effort to convince people that he isn't what he says he is.

While we're assuming the writer had the best intentions, the vast majority of this text is simply not true.

We urge you to dismiss the claim that Andrew isn't real, or any similar assertions that paint him as something he is not. Andrew has never worked behind the scenes with any individual or group in order to make it appear as though he doesn't exist.

Most of all, please simply stay focused on the power of partying and the joyful sensations Andrew W.K. works so hard to provide every day. That is where the truth lies.

PARTY FOREVER

Stereogum also apparently "premiered" the "You're Not Alone" video. I think it's safe to assume that W.K. had some involvement with this article.
posted by roll truck roll at 5:07 AM on September 30, 2018 [6 favorites]

If that's true (the chief argument for it being: why would there be this much genuine speculation out there about Andrew WK of all people?), then, honestly, fuck that guy.

I dunno. There's plenty of art in the world that makes me uncomfortable. Andrew WK, whatever else he does, has always (quite openly, I think), played on the improbability of his personal, but he still seems to have done more really nice things for people than most famous musicians, so I don't want to say "fuck you".

Personally, I think that the most obvious explanation for Andrew WK's desire to make us question his persona is that it keeps it exciting. "Nice guy party rocker" is an image someone like WK could probably sell for a few few years, but "Nice guy party rocker who might also be an evil genius" is a more interesting long-term proposition. It's possible for him to be being basically honest about who he is while delighting in and benefiting from, creating a mystique around his public persona.
posted by howfar at 5:25 AM on September 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

He's no Nicodemus
posted by SystematicAbuse at 5:32 AM on September 30, 2018

I'd never heard of him before, or else don't remember him. Listening to some of this stuff now, the polished and poppy sound with dark lyrics reminds me of Kevin Gilbert at times. That is a compliment.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:36 AM on September 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

If only Kevin Gilbert were still alive and putting us on.....https://youtu.be/fI4zXXCphxE
posted by ergomatic at 10:21 AM on September 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

I really like the “hiding in plain site” aspect of Andrew W.K.’s lyrics - how the anthemic style occludes the really weird language. I get that the piece needs an edit, but that fact is not more interesting than the themes and the author’s conclusion: that all of the endless writing about him on these old websites was by him. Also, there seems to be more than a little overlap persona-wise between him and Aphex Twin, i.e. the album covers for “close calls” and “I care because you do”. (Both artists relish lying to the press.) The fundamental project, that of creating something within pop culture and then undermining the reality of that thing seems super interesting, as it opens up thinking about the nature of reality in the context of pop culture. It also works as something of a critique of authenticity in the context of pop culture, which is something I’m super-interested in. I’d be interested in people’s thoughts about that stuff.
posted by hilberseimer at 10:50 AM on September 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

The Andrew W.K. -> Wolf Eyes connection posted about above totally blew my mind this morning. I wish I knew how to make memes so I could send something relevant about that to inzane johnny.

The AWK conspiracy theories about him not really being him have been going on for nearly 15 years at this point. When I was in high school in the mid-00’s I talked about this stuff with friends, trawled disparate message boards and chat rooms, and ultimately never found a solid conclusion to what is nominally a conspiracy theory. It’s funny that there’s an article about it on Stereogum, and as roll truck roll got to before me, I wouldn’t doubt if AWK (or whoever is pulling the strings) was involved somehow. In fact, my personal theory is that if you were able to go back to whenever there was a major release by AWK (in this case it looks like it’s a music video that Stereogum premiered) I’d bet you’d find instances of the conspiracy theory popping back up alongside the releases, but maybe it’s just a standalone complex at this point, a sort of meme, although I don’t know many people these days who have heard about this stuff, it was always sort of something that was consigned to metal nerds and people on message boards when I was younger. I probably haven’t heard anybody talk about this for a good 10 years or so.
posted by gucci mane at 11:14 AM on September 30, 2018 [2 favorites]

Also, I wanted to know about what people here thought about the usage of the term “gaslighting” in the article:

And in that light, how the hell were people buying W.K.’s Newspeak interpretation of the title I Get Wet? He was obviously retconning (or gaslighting), especially considering the alternate connotations.

I associate gaslighting with abusive people, like abusive partners and narcissists and people of that nature, not with possibly-fake musicians who aren’t actively doing something abusive, and the use of the term here really seems to really minimalise “actual” gaslighting. I’ve seen people online, especially in sort of leftier, tumblr-ish circles sort of casually use the word for basically any possibly obfuscatory language that may manipulate an individual, as opposed to the context of it with abusive individuals or apparatuses. Like, there could be some huge marketing campaign behind Andrew W.K. seeking to obfuscate “the truth”, but I wouldn’t personally consider that gaslighting in the same way that an ex-girlfriend of mine use to steal my journal and read it, and when I’d go looking for it and couldn’t find it she’d say “well you must have put it somewhere else or lost it, you always tend to lose things” even though I literally kept it in the same place all the time, thus making me feel crazy when I did find it back in that place later on. I really hate the use of it here in the article.
posted by gucci mane at 11:22 AM on September 30, 2018 [4 favorites]

Loved this article and thought the writing was great. Thanks for posting. Also started listening to 55 Cadillac when it was mentioned in the article and it does, indeed, rule.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 1:18 PM on September 30, 2018 [1 favorite]

Andrew W.K. definitely wrote this essay.
posted by parm at 1:48 PM on September 30, 2018 [5 favorites]

AWK likes to tease us that the persona of an artist is the front end of a media machine. Good, I agree.
posted by ovvl at 6:11 PM on September 30, 2018

I'm surprised the OP didn't mention the music video for Ever Again, which at minimum leans into the conspiracy theories.

Follow it up with The Devil's on your Side.
posted by postcommunism at 5:57 PM on October 3, 2018

I know this is a bit of a tangent but I'm not really good at listening to or retaining lyrics. I just kind of slowly absorb them through repeated listening, and even then I don't always put together the whole thing. Like, the bit in the article about "This is your time to pay / This is your judgment day / We made a sacrifice / And now we get to take your life"? I probably could have sang (sung?) along with that but if you'd asked me what it meant I would have just be like "I dunno ... it ... oh. wow." For the most part the lyrics being produced by the human voice are just like another instrument to my ear, an extended guitar solo or something.

All of that is the background to me saying that I got the new Andrew WK album from the library and listened to it a few times through while doing art/hobby stuff that usually occupies the most of my mind. At some point, maybe the third pass? I sat up straight and thought, "This sounds like a Christian rock album."

So I listened to it again with some intention and sure enough, there's all this talk of "I used to be like this, but now I'm not, and everything's peaceful and also there's this big power" and whatever, I'm exaggerating some because overall I didn't dig the album and I returned it to the library and I can't play all the tracks to get a sense. And maybe this has been covered at some point by people in the rock-n-roll press, whatever that is. I'm probably late to the scene here.

I had put most of that out of my mind until just now when I clicked through on that Ever Again link and man it all came rushing back. "They say that nobody changes but I'm living proof that they do" and "because I found the answer [while everyone on stage points straight up to heaven]" and "you can find the answer too" and "I'm never gonna lose my way - ever again" and "I thought I wouldn't survive / I learned a lot from my trip to the dark side" and "from here on out I'll keep my light alive" - all that is straight up sinner, redemption, proselytizing, basking in God's light kind of stuff. This is not the only song on the album that goes this path - my (hazy) memory is that the most of them do.

How does that factor into the Andrew WK narrative of reinvention and / or fake persona stuff? I have no idea, I'm just telling you that I recognized a certain flavor of song I remember from having grown up in the Church.
posted by komara at 8:22 PM on October 3, 2018 [2 favorites]

Mike Nelson = Nelson Mike
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:49 AM on October 7, 2018